


Hill 1478

by Okita3_Daishouri



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Fun With Acronyms & Slang, Gen, Korean War Analogue, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, The Clones Get Real Food, Worldbuilding, it doesn't end well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24681208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Okita3_Daishouri/pseuds/Okita3_Daishouri
Summary: An account of Forn Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Regiment, Ninety-Fifth Division, X Corps, Grand Army of the Republic, during the Lloth V winter offensive in the early months of the Clone Wars.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by, and adapted from, The Last Stand of Fox Company by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

**13:11:2 to 13:11:4**

Only the officers knew that the dark hovertrain tunnel a few hundred meters up the road marked the official entrance to the Anlem Gorge. The enlisted men didn’t have the map data, but they sensed it. Over the past several kilometers the broad rice paddies and vineyards, the neat rows of fruit trees, and the tiny farmhouses with their empty oxcarts had disappeared and had been replaced by the stark granite hills of upper Theis Glya. “Reconditioning Zone,” one of the clones said. A few others forced a grim laugh. To most of the clones, hostile terrain had begun as soon as they’d crossed the 38th Parallel and started the long slog north. Still, that dark tunnel looked ominous.

They were Forn Company, and just before they rounded the sharp bend in the road and humped into the tunnel they spotted Dorn Company engaged in a firefight, maybe eight hundred meters west, along the slopes of one of the broken-tooth mountains. They found this strange. By this point – more than four months since Inucru Gholril’s invasion of Steix Glya, and six weeks after the Grand Army’s successful counterattack at Osnela – the Theis Glyans could be counted on to cut and run at the first sign of clone troops. But Dorn Company seemed to be meeting serious opposition, and some of the clones in Forn Company began to wonder if the regimental commander’s warning hadn’t been the usual hot air; perhaps the Espalese had indeed crossed the Falry River and entered the war.

In any event, that was Dorn’s problem, at least for the time being, and as Forn emerged from the north end of the tunnel and into the dusk, the sheer hills on either side of the company loomed high and tight.

It was a good place to call a halt, and the outfit’s enigmatic commander, Captain Zorn, decided to bed down the column for the night. One of the actions that had Zorn’s men often glancing at him warily was calling in an air strike uncomfortably close to their own position. On another occasion he mistakenly radioed for artillery support on Forn Company’s own coordinates. The sun was dipping over the stout, charcoal-colored western hills, and an eerie gray mist shrouded the forbidding taller mountains to the north. Forn was still about six and a half kilometers south of its objective, the tiny crossroads hamlet of Anlem, but Zorn’s men had slept hardly at all for two days. The CO considered the odds: with the First Battalion out in front, and the Third Battalion following close behind, he expected no trouble. Before assigning night watches, however, Zorn did take one precaution. He ordered the leaders of his three rifle platoons to have each of their men take a good long look at the four clones from the First Battalion who had been knifed in their sleeping bags twenty-four hours earlier. Their cold bodies, laid in a small depression between a creek bed and the dirt road, were still wrapped in their bloody bags. Sergeant Irrik of Second Platoon spat. He’d seen worse, on Geonosis and Thule. Still, he never got used to the sight.

As darkness fell and the temperature dropped, Forn was strung out perhaps three hundred sixty meters along the road, with sentries snaking up the overhanging ridgelines. All the scuttlebutt about the Separatist Espalese spooked the company, and scattered small arms fire and an occasional howitzer report puncturing the cold air from up ahead didn’t help. At midnight a rumor started that a Theis Glyan tank was prowling the area, and this put everyone’s nerves on edge. But there were no incidents.

Not long after sunrise, a few clones spotted the column of soldiers exiting the tunnel, seventy meters south of their bivouac. These were definitely troopers, maybe 200 all told, marching in twos with a brisk, jaunty step – far too crisp for them to be the weary troopers of Third Battalion’s rear guard. And they were wearing unfamiliar uniforms. But Forn Company has been relieving numerous Steix Glyan infantrymen all along the road north, and these were likely more of the same. The clones had taken to calling their allies LOGs, after Steix Glya’s official name, the League of Glyans.

Corporal Munks, a forward artillery observer attached to Forn from the Second Battalion’s mortar unit, was the first to see them – and the first to sense that something was not right. They were no more than thirty- or forty-five meters away when he hollered, “Halt. Who goes there?”

The answer was a fusillade of automatic weapons fire. Munks dived behind a rock. When he emptied the clip of his carbine into the two columns, they broke to both sides of the road and assumed firing positions. Munks was impressed by their discipline – a trait heretofore lacking among most of the Seps he’d encountered. Now Munks could hear Captain Zorn running toward him, yelling, “Hold your fire! Friendly! Friendly!”

But the bolts snapping over Munks's head were far from friendly, and as he shouldered his carbine and squeezed off another pack he watched Forn Company’s civilian interpreter tackle the captain and pull him down into a ditch on the side of the road.

By now the Espalese – as Munks had concluded they were – had set up two heavy repeating blasters on either side of the tunnel entrance and were pouring fire into the company’s mortar squad strung out along the creek bed. Half a dozen clones fell instantly. Munks was debating what to do when a helmet popped up beside him. It was Sergeant Irrik, who had crawled through a culvert under the road.

“Gotta keep ‘em off those mortar men,” Irrik said. He began picking off enemy soldiers with his DC-15A. Munks reloaded and joined in with his carbine, aiming especially for the ones manning the repeaters. When they had both run out of ammunition they fell back to Captain Zorn’s ditch. The captain was on the radio, ordering several fire teams to take the high ground and secure the main ridgeline on the east side of the gorge. Simultaneously, a large unit of Espalese broke off from the gunfight in the valley and began scrabbling up the steep hills.

A T-21 man from the Second Platoon watched them: maybe a hundred or so soldiers no more than two hundred seventy meters away, climbing a parallel peak. They were hopping along the ridgeline like rabbits, and he was so impressed with their agility and the sharp cut of their uniforms – hells, even their backpacks looked impossibly squared away – that he initially thought they might be some crack Republic outfit he didn’t recognize.

But when his squad reached the top of the ridge they were stopped in their tracks by the disconcerting sight of a lone Espalese officer standing atop a giant boulder and dragging casually on a cigarette. At the clones’ approach he flicked his butt in their direction, jumped from the rock, and disappeared over the reverse slope. The clones had been too stunned by his presence to shoot him. When they reached the boulder they found radio wires running down the cleft in the ridgeline. A couple of men unsheathed field knives to cut the wires, and someone said, “The bastard’s been watching us the whole time.”

From the top of the hill the clones of Forn Company could again see Dorn Company, fighting for its life far to the west. Not a few men wondered what in the hells was happening.

Meanwhile, down in the creek bed, one of the wounded clones cried for help. A medic squatting next to Captain Zorn made to rise from the ditch, but the company’s gunnery sergeant shouldered him back to the ground. Because of the Espalese repeater fire, any attempt at rescue seemed futile. But Sergeant Irrik decided to chance it. He scooped up the medic’s kit and took off. Zorn and the few clones behind him opened up with covering fire. Irrik made the creek bed. The clones near Zorn whooped with admiration. Irrik was unlashing the med kit from his shoulder when he was stitched across the face by repeater fire. His helmet seemed to split in half, the top lifting up as if pulled by invisible wires.

Captain Zorn ordered a counterattack, and the remaining Espalese fled up the hill, leaving perhaps fifty of their dead strewn across the road. The rest of the day became a long, tense standoff as the clones and the Espalese regulars attempted to outflank each other on the ridgelines. Sniper fire and the occasional _pop_ of small mortar rounds echoed off the hills. Zorn radioed Division and then ordered Forn Company to dig in for the night as he and his staff laid plans for a dawn attack.

But by sunrise the Espalese had vanished, and the clones of Forn Company were left to wonder if this disappearance was permanent, or if this skirmish meant the timeline of the campaign had just been extended.


	2. The Hill (I)

**13:11:27**

The clones moved in slow motion, as if their boots were sticking to the frozen sludge of snow, ice, and mud. They had been dug in on this Force-forsaken Theis Glyan hillside for less than forty-eight hours, yet when the 192 officers and enlisted men of Forn Company, Second Battalion, Seventh Regiment were ordered to fall in, gear up, and move out, their mood became almost wistful – or what passed for wistful in the Grand Army of the Republic.

Just past sunrise, Private Gravel crawled from his foxhole, stomped some warmth into his swollen feet, and took a look at the new line replacements. Most of these men – boys, really – were from the reinforcement transports who had joined the company within the past couple of weeks. He knew few of their names. “Shinies,” he spat. “Don’t know how good they had it sitting up here fat and happy.”

The words came out in a voice very much outside the typical clone’s, so gravelly you could walk on it, and thus not surprisingly where he got his name. The sky began to spit snow as he packed his kit and continued to gripe. Corporal Trydan, Gravel’s fire team leader from the Second Squad, Third Platoon, shot him a sideways glance. _Fat and happy?_ Two men from the outfit had been wounded on a recon patrol the previous night. But Trydan let it slide. Gravel had been in a foul mood since the “feast”, when his bowels were roiled by the frozen meat he had wolfed down outside the battalion mess.

At first the feast served three days earlier had seemed a welcome respite from the dry, unappealing, and dead-tasting field rations every clone carried on their person. But at least a third of the outfit had picked up the trots from eating the ice-cold candied sweet tubers, sausage stuffing, and some kind of alien game bird smothered in gravy – served hot, but flash-frozen to their trays by the time the clones made it back to their foxholes that felt more like meat lockers. Elongated strips of frozen diarrhea now littered the trench latrine.

Gravel threw his pack over his shoulders. “Off to kill more Seps in some other dunghole for Peace, Republic, and Dugout Dom,” he said. A couple of guys choked out a laugh at his scornful reference to the Theater Commander, Jedi General Domtrys Brebarr. He’d set up his headquarters in the southern city of Sumolara, and according to scuttlebutt, had never left it. The official line was that the Jedi’s days were taken up with planning and coordinating the efforts of the various local forces in conjunction with the GAR, but Gravel and the enlisted men of Forn Company were not much given to wider strategy. Theirs was a tactical clash, the fighting on foot and deadly: hilltop to hilltop, ridgeline to ridgeline. Whatever small plateau of land the clones controlled at any given moment constituted their total zone of influence, and was ceded again to the enemy once they had departed.

The deadly T-21 light repeating blaster was the weapon of choice for the strongest clones, and one of Forn Company’s T-21 men was Private Stikill. Just that morning, he had been introduced to his new assistant, Private Drum, one of the replacements fresh from Kamino. Drum had been on Lloth V for less than a week. “Forget the flag, patriotism, and the Seps,” Stikill told him. “We never own any territory; we’re just renting. You’re out here for the fight and the adventure.” Drum hung on to the old-timer’s every word. Stikill was _maybe_ all of three months older.

Gravel wouldn’t have argued with Stikill’s advice. He’d always been possessed of a truculent attitude, and certainly wanted to fight. He would, as he put it, “run through fire in a ship fuel suit to find the raxo party.”

From the beginning of the campaign, clone troopers had been approached by Glyan children who pointed at them and said something that sounded like “I raxo.” Actually, the Glyan word _raxo_ means “country,” and the children’s use of the phrase _aeh raxo_ was probably a complimentary reference to the Republic as a “beautiful country”, however technically inaccurate. But among the clones, the term _raxo_ soon took on a pejorative sense, meaning any Llothern, especially an enemy Llothern. Gravel’s constant refrain since the landings at Osnela had been, “When do we get the raxo party started?” It was now Forn Company’s catchphrase after every ambush and firefight: _Hey, Gravel, big enough party for you?_

The men of the company had attracted their fair share of fighting. Admittedly, one month earlier, they had endured a ten-hour “flight to nowhere” around the inhabited moon. They had boarded “low altitude assault transports, infantry” (LAAT/Is, or “lartys”) at Osnela and had flown in to an unopposed landing near the starport of Piolia far in the northeast. To their humiliation, they had been beaten there by a separate flight carrying civilian reporters and “abo” government gawkers.

Yet this peaceful debarkation at Piolia was the exception. Almost from the moment they touched dirt (well… touched snow), the clones of Forn Company encountered bloody, if sporadic, resistance along their three-hundred-twenty-kilometer slog north. The holonews correspondent Antdav Pentwhit once noted that conflict was the galaxy’s way of teaching sentients geography and astronomy, and now obscure dots on the Llothern map with names like Pobitis and Pophus and Utov-ul were proving their prescience. The company had lost good men in each of these places, and nearly a month earlier, during a two-day firefight at the Anlem Gorge, the Seventh Regiment encountered its first Espalese. They’d beaten them decisively, but afterward Forn had buried another eight brothers.

Forn Company was only a tiny component of the Ninety-Fifth Division, which was itself just part of a pincer movement organized by General Brebarr. From his headquarters all those kilometers south in Sumolara, Brebarr commanded two separate Grand Army columns moving inexorably north toward the Siuvis region. The columns were separated by eighty-nine kilometers of what Brebarr described as the “merciless wasteland” of Theis Glya’s mountains. In the western half of Theis Glya, near the Chotov Sea, the Eighth Army, augmented by Steix Glyan and other local troops – more than 120,000 combat soldiers in all – was overstretched in a thin line running from Yision deep into the barren northern countryside.

Farther east, Brebarr’s X Corps, 35,000 strong, was also marching north, with eventual plans to meet the Eighth Army somewhere along the Falry River, the country’s northern border with Espal. Commanded by Jedi General Barjos Siashan, X Corps was a fusion of two Steix Glyan Army divisions; a small unit of Republic Commandos; and a regimental combat team, put together from the GAR’s Seventh and Third Divisions. There was also practically all of the Ninety-Fifth Division in its entirety. The Ninety-Fifth’s clones considered General Siashan as somewhat too adoring of Brebarr, and there was a tacit understanding among military observers both on the ground in Glya and back on Coruscant, that this fight belonged to the Ninety-Fifth Division.

The Ninety-Fifth Division was commanded by Jedi General Yamagata Tomoe and consisted of three infantry regiments – the First, the Fifth, and the Seventh – which were supported by the Eleventh, an artillery regiment. Each regiment consisted of about 3,500 men: three battalions, each of approximately 1,000 men in three companies of anywhere from 200 to 300 men. All told, General Yamagata had about 15,000 of her troopers along one-hundred-five kilometers of a rutted Theis Glyan road that ran north to an enormous sentient-made lake the clones called the Selxin Reservoir, or the “frozen” Selxin.

Brebarr’s plan was to sweep Theis Glya free of the Separatist dictator Inucru Gholril’s fleeing Theis Glyan Army all the way to the Falry River. He boasted to reporters that once his troops had mopped up the last stragglers and diehards of Gholril’s army, the clone troops would be off-world by Life Day. This would be a nice, short little campaign, wrapped up in five months. But even after the Theis Glyan capital, Strotowei, fell to the white jobs of the Eighth Army, the clones of Forn Company were hard-pressed to reconcile their own reality with Brebarr’s optimism.

As Forn’s crusty platoon sergeant Dynn had muttered after the brief, brutal scuffle at Anlem, “If these are the Force-damn stragglers, don’t even show me the diehards.” Dynn, a survivor of Geonosis, had a lot of hard bark on him, and he had learned through experience to trust little that came out of any general’s mouth, particularly a Jedi General in the south and away from the front line. He’d overheard a saying from some belligerent Senator or other, that war is too serious to be left to the generals. _Now, there was a sentient who knew what they were talking about._ Dynn figured that Senator must have once served as an enlisted being.

Forn Company had caught only the ragged edges of the battle at Anlem. Other companies took the brunt of the attacks by what were described as a few Espalese “diplomatic volunteers” who had snuck across the Falry River to aid the Glyans in the campaign against Republic imperialism. Nonetheless, every clone involved in the fight had been staggered by the disregard for life the Espalese displayed. Tales spread among the regiment of how a clone heavy repeater emplacement could take out half an enemy infantry company, and the remaining half would still keep charging. They’d been told they were ordered because the galaxy _didn’t_ want to do the fighting itself, that nat-born sentients would cut and run before they died, but it looked like the Espalese hadn’t gotten the memo. Paramount in every clone’s mind that late winter month was a frightening question: _Where were the rest of the Seps, and when were they coming?_

A month earlier, the foreign minister of Espal, Tyell Chahunt, had issued a public warning to the Republic to keep their distance from the Falry. Cartri Chamat, the Espalese leader, backed up his minister’s threats by massing several armies of the Espalese Armed Force (EAF) on the far side of the river. This only served to inflame Brebarr’s ego. After the landings as Osnela, in a meeting with the Council, Brebarr brushed off Chamat’s move as “diplomatic blackmail.”

“We are no longer fearful of their intervention,” he told Master Windu. “If the Espalese tried to get down to Strotowei, there would be the greatest slaughter.”

Perhaps. But despite Brebarr’s insistence that only a few Espalese had voluntarily crossed the Falry – barely enough to make up a division – there were rumors running through the Republic lines that several EAF armies had in fact begun infiltrating Theis Glya a month and a half ago. These reports were not lost on the anxious Jedi General Yamagata. A cautious woman, she had never shared Brebarr’s expectation of a quick victory in Theis Glya – privately, she scoffed at the “off-world by Life Day poodoo.” She was certain her troopers would face strong Espalese resistance west of the Selxin Reservoir as they pushed toward the Falry. In a private dispatch to her old mentor, Jedi Master Jeral Adan, on Coruscant – a back-channel communication that enraged Brebarr when he learned of it – Yamagata pleaded for “someone in high authority who will make his mind up as to what is our goal.” She apologized to Adan for the “pessimistic” tone of her message but explained that to obey Brebarr’s and Siashan’s instructions to push on with the Ninety-Fifth Division’s flanks so exposed “was to simply get further out on a limb.”

“I believe a winter campaign in the mountains of Theis Glya is too much to ask of the clone army and the native,” Yamagata wrote, “and I doubt the feasibility of supplying troops in this area during the winter or providing for evacuation of sick and wounded. I feel you are entitled to know what our on-the-spot reaction is.”

Yamagata noted in her message that about half her fighting men were raw, unseasoned replacements – despite the fact that when the Ninety-Fifth Division had been hastily deployed to northeast Lloth V all the division’s “close-enoughs” (clones not quite of deployment age, but _close enough_ it barely mattered) were culled from the ranks to remain in rearward supporting roles. Moreover, in many cases reinforcements with simulation “mastery” – either an unbroken string of seventy-two sims without dying or two strings of thirty-six – were deemed “combat ready” by dint of this training, despite the fact they had little to no live-fire experience.

Before Anlem, no more than a handful of clones from Forn Company had ever seen an Espalese soldier – and the others probably wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between an Espalese and a Theis Glyan. Corporal Groz, who was one of the “old men” in Forn, was, however one of the few. He had originally touched dirt as security detail for a Senatorial envoy and been wounded, getting folded into the Ninety-Fifth after recovering, and he told his buddies that their firefight at Anlem was a picnic compared to what he’d seen and heard before. He added that they sure as hells would recognize a full force of “fighting Espalese” when they met it. For one thing, the Espalese were taller, Groz said, and a hell of a lot more robust and better armed than the mobile scarecrows still loyal to Inucru Gholril. Groz also warned that the Espalese soldiers were veterans of Chamat’s civil war with the Old Order, and their fighting ability was not to be taken lightly. “And the LOGs damn well know that,” he added.

As Groz’s stories spread, a few troopers of Forn Company thought back to a scene they had witnessed a couple of days after Anlem. While moving north, the outfit had passed a League of Glyans Army unit marching south with a single Espalese prisoner. The clones didn’t have much faith in the fighting ability of most LOGs to begin with, but at the same time more than a few troopers were shaken by the overt fear their Steix Glyan allies exhibited at the mere presence of this shackled Espalese in their midst.

Nonetheless, by the time Forn Company lined up for its surprise “feast”, they hadn’t seen a hostile Espalese in the four weeks since Anlem. The Espalese had simply disappeared, and a buoyant feeling was slowly returning to the company – a sense that Life Day might indeed be celebrated in the hangars and holds of the _White Viper_ , en route to the next battlefront.


	3. The Hill (II)

**13:11:27**

The ebb and flow of the Llothern campaign had pushed Forn Company to a remote, windswept tableland 338 kilometers north of the 38th Parallel, which had been the long-contested border between the two Glyas. The locals called it _Kouma Gylod_ , the roof of the Glyan peninsula.

The earliest settlers, when they discovered it, painted a romantic portrait of this sawtooth terrain, likening it to a sea in a heavy gale. For weeks, Forn had been traversing this knotted ground, up one desolate mountain, down the next, hiking cold and wet to the Falry – and these exhausted men did not compose any lyrical odes to the place. Some troopers in Forn Company had come to consider the situation a cruel game, and with nothing to lose they began playing it themselves. At dusk they would search the compass points and pick out the highest, coldest-looking hills. Then they would wager on which one they would be sent to hold for the night.

Now they were on the move again. The knoll Forn was abandoning after the “feast” rose west of the village of Chueliv-ul, which to the clones resembled what the simulations had called a “mining camp, generic”, with its dilapidated houses packed close around newly erected tents. The village was situated atop a muddy, triangular plateau whose southern terminus was a broad field crammed with more rows of sleep tents, supply trains, and fuel and ammunition dumps. On the edge of this clearing clone engineers operated five tractors day and night under fixed floodlights, chugging to and fro, carving a crude landing zone out of the frozen earth. Scuttlebutt had it inside Chueliv-ul’s defensive perimeter that Forn was preparing to move up a winding, three-and-a-half meters wide dirt road that Command had designated Main Service Road TG72, or simply the MSR.

Most of the men believed they would be traveling the twenty-two-and-a-half kilometers north to another tiny village, Ineter-lo, which was in a floodplain between two rivers and the northwestern tip of the Selxin reservoir. There they assumed they would rejoin the bulk of their Seventh Regiment and its commanding officer, Colonel Getar, a stubborn, impatient man known as “Get-em Getar.” Getar’s regiment was part of a force of 8,400 that – along with most of Colonel Magic’s Fifth Regiment and three artillery battalions of the Eleventh Regiment – was the tip of X Corps’ spear. Thirteen kilometers to the east, across the reservoir, 2,550 white jobs from two battalions of the Seventh Division were also positioned to storm north, locked and loaded, anticipating Brebarr’s order to commence the final push to the Falry.

But as Forn Company assembled outside the Battalion Command Post in Chueliv-ul, word filtered down that they were headed not to the reservoir, but instead to Ophoril Pass – eleven klicks north, midway between Chueliv-ul and Ineter-lo. There they were to dig in along one of the lower ridgelines of the highest mountain in the area, the 1,662-meter Ophoril Peak, which overlooked the MSR where it cut through the pass. It was the only road into or out of the Selxin.

This order to essentially babysit at a bottleneck did not sit well with Forn Company. In fact, the troopers could not comprehend it. The Theis Glyans had been on the run for ten weeks, and by this stage in the war even Chueliv-ul was considered a safe enough rear area to have its own Distribution Center, even if its stock was limited to electrolyte mix and armor polish. Moreover, the very idea that Getar’s and Magic’s rear supply route needed guarding was ludicrous. The enlisted men of Forn would have much preferred to push on farther north to Ineter-lo, lest they cede bragging rights to some undeserving outfit. Besh Company of the regiment’s First Battalion was already boasting about the carpet of corpses it had left in the hilltops, gorges, and draws around Anlem. This was more than nettlesome, particularly because in Forn’s opinion Besh Company wouldn’t know its _shebs_ from a hole in the ground. Naturally, the troopers blamed this strange turn of events – as they blamed most things – on Brebarr’s inconceivable decision to place X Corps under the overall command of (according to the scuttlebutt) an itinerant academic: Siashan. This was another reason for Forn Company to add Siashan’s name to their already long shit list.

The gouged, dome-topped Ophoril Peak, eroded by time and Glya’s bitter winters, is a southeastern spur of the ancient Liacur mountain range. This stunted cordillera hugs the Sea of Touliv from the Espalese border well into Steix Glya, and it reminded some of the troopers of the Alderaan simulations. They’d all been impressed by those mountains – that is, until they’d moved on to the Hoth sims. After completing that series, the Aderaanian heights – like the scrubby piles of granite they gazed up at now in Theis Glya – had diminished in their memories. Compared against Hoth’s peaks, the Liacurs seemed more hills than mountains. This impression changed when they had to climb one.

Republic propaganda showed the clone trooper as tall, square-jawed, powerful, and mature, but the majority of the “men” of Forn were baby-faced “shinies” who had only recently started to shave. During down time, they would sit around looking lost until lights-out, and the opposite sex was something exotic that existed only to be lied about and ogled. Now, in Glya, with their gaunt profiles reflecting the rigors of constant battle marches, they suggested not so much a picture of Republican prowess and more of a scraggly crew of teenage pirates.

The onset of Theis Glyan winter had been harsh; they were frozen and exhausted when it snowed, and they were frozen and exhausted when it didn’t snow. An unremitting wet gale blew constantly – the troopers took to calling it the “Siuvian Express” – and glazed every rock with ice. Their knees, knuckles, and elbows were covered in bruises from continually slipping on treacherous slopes, and their feet and hands were always numb. Hours during the day were hardly noted, as they set their body clocks only by daylight and darkness. And aside from a vague awareness that Life Day was coming, many had no idea what date it was, much less what day of the week.

Moreover, because water constantly had to be thawed over campfires, shipside notions of hygiene had been abandoned from almost the moment they had set foot on Glyan soil. A twig often had to do for a toothbrush, and many troopers had started to sleep with their helmets on to try to avoid waking up with a scalpful of lice. Most of them had given up trying to wipe their runny noses, and anyone who grew a mustache soon had a revolting mass of frozen mucus layered across his upper lip.

They groused and grumbled, but they never shirked a command, because at the end of the day: “good soldiers follow orders.” And so, just past noon, while Forn Company mustered in the village of Chueliv-ul, Major Hook, commanding officer of the Seventh Regiment’s Second Battalion, summoned his subordinate Captain Drifter, Forn Company’s new CO, for a trip on the company speeder to scout Ophoril Pass.

Drifter was a veteran who had assumed command of Forn three weeks earlier at Utov-ul, after his predecessor, Captain Zorn, was transferred to Division headquarters. Drifter was on the tall end for a clone, and was what some of the nat-borns had called a “mustang,” an enlisted man promoted to officer whose leadership skills had been honed in the ranks as opposed to the sim chamber. During the awful attrition of the First Battle of Geonosis, he wound up in an acting platoon commander role. On Thule he was shot in the hand and was briefly evacuated when he began bleeding from both ears. He was diagnosed with a severe concussion, but he recovered and returned to the front, where he rescued two wounded troopers pinned down by enemy fire. He was promoted to captain and awaiting assignment when Inucru Gholril’s 90,000-man army, led by 150 Separatist-made tanks, swarmed across the 38th Parallel. Gholril’s forces routed the Steix Glyans and their Republican protectors and captured the capital of Yision in three days. Once word reached him of their destination, he read early news accounts of the conflict with a mixture of fascination, disgust, and sadness.

His fascination stemmed from a clone officer’s professional appreciation of the fighting spirit of Gholril’s ill-equipped but courageous and tenacious forces. They reminded Drifter of the Geonosians he had fought in the first days of the war. On the other hand, he was disgusted by the disorganized retreat of the unprepared Judicial-led forces down the peninsula. And he was saddened by the unusually high number of clone commanders, most of them fellow campaign veterans, who were killed as the Theis Glyan Army swiftly occupied 95 percent of the country.

By the time of Brebarr’s audacious counterattack – the landing as Osnela, just southwest of Yision, two and a half months later – Drifter had received his orders to report to the front. He was en route as Forn Company embarked on the long ride to Piolia. He caught up with them just south of the secured village of Utov-ul.

Drifter did not endear himself to Forn’s careworn veterans when he arrived off the transport. His armor was spotless, and one trooper noted that “he was all dressed up like a well-kept grave.” But he believed that a trooper’s appearance should reflect combat readiness, and he was appalled at his new outfit’s slovenly demeanor; he told several fellow officers that they reminded him of a Holonet bandit gang. He introduced himself by directing his platoon leaders to order all the troopers in Forn to field-shave with cold water, clean their filthy weapons, and prepare for a conditioning hike at 0600 the next morning. He also spread word to knock off the fairy-tale talk about being off-world by Life Day.

“Just what we need,” said the veteran private Atti, “some candy-ass captain who wants us to troop and stomp. What in the hells is this campaign coming to?”

Nor did Drifter’s official introductory remarks the next morning before the hike go over well. He told his assembled company that there was a lot of campaign left to fight, and Forn was damn well going to be prepared to fight it. He spoke with a bit of a drawl. “I may not know about strategy,” he said, “but I know a lot about tactics. And frankly, I’m a hell of a good infantry officer.”

As the captain’s coming-aboard speech ended and the assembly broke up, Gravel remarked to a group of buddies, “Somebody ought to tell this guy that around here we’re more show-me than tell-me.”

Drifter overheard him but said nothing. He liked grumbling troopers. The more they grumbled, the harder they fought. Plus, as an enlisted man he’d been a griper himself. Forn would learn soon that behind the new CO’s prickly and fastidious exterior was a saltiness earned on the red sands of the Petranaki arena.


	4. The Hill (III)

**13:11:27**

Although Drifter had only just met his superior Major Hook, he already admired Hook’s nerve. The story of how the pink-cheeked, perpetually smiling officer had held his own during his first meeting with “Get-em Getar” three weeks earlier had circulated swiftly throughout the Seventh Regiment. When Hook arrived at Utov-ul to assume command of the Second Battalion, Getar had taken in his preppy demeanor with a thunderous stare.

“I see you’re overweight,” Getar said by way of introduction.

“Nothing like a mountain campaign to get a man into shape,” Hook replied. His voice was a little too cheerful. The colonel's observation was patently untrue.

“I’m a hard taskmaster,” Getar said, glaring at him.

Hook smiled. “That’s what I’ve heard, Colonel.”

No one else dared talk to Getar like this, and the exchange immediately elevated Hook’s status among Getar’s underlings, if not with the colonel himself.

Now, as Drifter and Hook’s speeder ascended the road to Ophoril Pass, the weak sun burned the haze off mountain meadows dotted with thatched-roof huts and empty oxcarts standing nearby. This was a sudden new world – big, muscular, and edged at its margins by brooding storm clouds. Both men had received sketchy reports of enemy contact earlier that day at the Selxin, probably involving Espalese units that had forded the Falry, and this gave their eleven-kilometer drive an uneasy tone.

In fact, as they snaked further away from Chueliv-ul and up the steep slopes toward Ophoril Peak, two things struck them with foreboding. The first was their topographical map data. It was outdated, adapted from old documents, and nothing on the charts seemed to match the contours of the terrain. Peaks loomed high on the wrong side of the road, valleys opened where there should have been hills, and snow-covered foot trails meandered next to streams – frozen solid and marbled with blue ice – that should not have existed. More ominous was the absence of refugees. Since the landings at Piolia the clones had encountered emaciated Theis Glyan civilians on nearly every road and animal path. But this morning the MSR was deserted even by the small groups of bedraggled boys who usually begged for sweets.

Drifter had done his homework, which included reading a translated copy of _Military Lessons_ , the propaganda tract the Separatist high command had disseminated among its troops. This pamphlet had been found in the pocket of a dead Espalese NCO at Anlem. After grudgingly noting the tactical superiority of Republic tanks, airpower, and artillery, it declared, “Their infantry is weak. These men are afraid to die, and will neither press home a bold attack nor defend to the death. If their source of supply is cut, their fighting suffers, and if you interdict their rear, they will withdraw.”

Drifter had also scanned intelligence files prepared by the Steix Glyan army interpreters at HQ in Chueliv-ul. Several local farmers had been interviewed, and they reported that the area’s abundant game had lately been spooked out of the narrow mountain vales around the Ophoril Pass. It was as if something was moving around in there. He suspected it was a _shebs-_ load of Seps.

Upon reaching the switchback where the MSR looped east to west at the apex of the pass, Drifter and Hook dismounted before a steep, broad eminence on the north side of the road and began climbing in the shadow of Ophoril Peak. They were at 1,478 meters when they reached the roughly seventy-meter-wide crest of the promontory, a shoulder of the big mountain. The effect of being cut off from the sea by mountains to the west, east, and southeast had extraordinary consequences. The raw, wet wind screaming out of the northern polar cap and across the Siuvian plain, and then funneling through the pass, was the fiercest either man had ever encountered. The area around the Selxin Reservoir was said to be the coldest place in Glya, and the fallow terrain was the only ground in the country where rice could not be grown. The locals knew to expect an average of sixteen to twenty weeks each winter when the average temperature never rose above zero degrees, and Drifter could not help wondering how drastically this cold would reduce his company’s combat efficiency.

The hill they stood on loomed above two narrow valleys and occupied an area about sixteen thousand square meters. At the top of the hill, on the northwest quadrant, the ground extended to form a narrow saddle – almost seventy meters wide and humped like a whale’s back. This land bridge, which ran two hundred seventy-four meters, fell away sharply on both sides and ended at a large, rocky knoll. Above and beyond the rocky knoll a string of higher, serrated rocky ridges ran a bit over half a kilometer like a gleaming white staircase up he looming bulk of Ophoril Peak.

Except for the narrow saddle, the hill was well separated from the other heights in all directions by slender, snow-covered valleys. The basins to the east and west stretched a bit over one hundred eighty meters across, with the western depression bisected by a deep ravine running lengthwise up to the edge of the saddle. The wider southern vale – level bottom ground with brown tufts of alpine grass dotting the snow like miniature haystacks – ran about two hundred eighty meters. These valleys separated the hill from three similar, tree-skirted knolls to the east, west, and south.

Delineating the base of the hill, adjacent to the road, was a sheer cut bank, three meters high by twelve meters long, where the MSR had been chiseled out of the heights eighteen years earlier. Past this steep wall, neat rows of trees, ten to twelve centimeters thick at the trunk and perhaps twelve meters tall, climbed two-thirds of the way up the slope. These immature evergreens, planted as part of an emergency reforestation program, were spaced two to three meters apart. Above the tree line the crest of the hill sported small patches of gnarled brush that pushed through the hard-packed, knee-deep snow. The undulating hilltop was also broken by countless rocks and colossal boulders. Two of the largest boulders – a pair of tall, flat-faced rocks, about two meters square – dominated the northwest corner of the peak at the beginning of the saddle.

The hill’s main, central ridgeline rose to 205 meters above the road at its northeast corner, and dipped to 160 meters at the northwest peak, where the saddle began. A secondary, catty-corner ridgeline bisected the hill from the lower, southwest corner and petered out at the tree line. The entire hill was pocked and pleated with depressions, erosion folds, and a few old bivouac bunkers and foxholes that had been rocketed and napalmed by the Republic as Getar had ascended the pass on his march to Ineter-lo. A shallow gully, eighteen meters wide, ran straight up the middle of the hill from the road to just beyond the trees. In the lower, southeast corner, below the tree plantation, a freshwater spring flowed out of the mountains despite the freezing temperature.

Near the spring, two abandoned huts had been built several meters back from the road. These structures were about three meters high, with dirt floors, low-pitched roofs, and doorless opening at either end. The larger hut, which ran parallel to the MSR, was perhaps three-and-a-half by six meters and was divided into two sections. It looked as if it had been a subsistence farmhouse – half of it seemed to be a kitchen. The slightly smaller hut, sitting at a right angle about nine meters up the hill behind the main house, retained a strong odor of farm animals and had a large grain storage bin at its south end, closest to the main building.

As Drifter and Hook climbed back down to their speeder, the new commanding officer of Forn Company was already conceptualizing his defensive perimeter. His troopers, Drifter told Hook, would defend Ophoril Pass from this hill. He would align his men up the gentler eastern grade, across the crest, and down the steep western slope. The road would “close” the two ends of the line, with the breadth of the oval perhaps 140 meters wide from east to west.

After Hook accepted his plan, Drifter asked to remain at the pass while Hook returned to Chueliv-ul. Hook reluctantly agreed and told him to expect the arrival of his company within the hour.

Back in the village, however, Hook could find no vehicles to transport Forn Company up the MSR. At 1400 hours word passed among the men that they would be hiking the eleven kilometers up the icy, muddy, glorified animal trail. One clone noted in his journal, “Now we gripe openly and vociferously.”

The footsore troopers of Forn Company were not happy to be lugging more than 27 kilos each of weapons, ammo, and gear up the road. In addition to the standard-issue DC-15A – a fifty-shot, pack-fed blaster rifle that weight about four kilograms – they carried carbines, sidearms, light machine guns, mortar barrel tubes and plates, rocket launchers, entrenching tools, boxes and bandoliers of ammunition, cartons of rations, satchels of grenades, heavy sleeping bags, command post and medical tents, medical supplies, multiple radios, half-tent covers, and personal items such as books, extra socks, souvenirs, and a bathroom kit. Some had holdout blasters, looted from one place or another, tucked away.

This late in the afternoon, no one was confident of reaching Ophoril Pass before dark, but luck struck when the company’s forward artillery observer announced that he had scrounged transport from the commanding officer of Herf Company, the Second Battalion’s 105-mm howitzer unit based at Chueliv-ul. The “arty boys” had agreed to lend Forn the nine speeder trucks they used to lug their big guns.

“Bring them back with the tanks full,” one of the artillerymen joked, and at 1430 hours, the company was ordered to saddle up. As men climbed onto the open flatbeds of the repulsorlifts and squeezed onto the company landspeeder – some troopers riding on the engine block – more than a few freezing men wondered where their new commanding officer was.


End file.
